The most extreme current views about Israel — pro and anti — each has a blind spot that masks an instructive cautionary tale: about the danger of Jews allying outside the Jewish community against the best interests of Jews, in one case; and about the importance of recognizing long-term problems through the filter of short-term gain, in the other. For those of us raised with the mantra “everything in moderation,” both extreme views elicit great surprise and concern. Surprise, because there is a clear absence of a critical thinking mindset that, since antiquity, has been one of the hallmarks of Jewish thinking; concern because anyone familiar with the history of Jewish politics knows where each of these views leads. 

The one example concerns those Jews who have bought into the notion that the State of Israel is somehow the embodiment of much of what is wrong with the world. This view invokes the worst sins perpetrated by wealthier, more powerful states — colonialism, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, racism — as a rationale not only for delegitimizing the State of Israel but also for perpetrating violence against Israelis and even against Jews. The veracity of these claims (as I have written previously on these pages) lies somewhere between highly problematic and lacking any substantive foundation. Yet for the last year and a half or more, a small but vocal group of Jews have embraced these claims blindly, seemingly unaware...

This lack of vision recalls a similar myopia more than a century ago. After the pogroms against Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement in the early 1880s, which the Russian Socialist Party condemned as counter-revolutionary, some Russian Jews embraced Russian Socialism on the assumption, reasonable at the time, that the transformation of Russian society through social revolution would eliminate antisemitism. For the next two decades, more and more Russian Jews embraced Russian socialism in one form or another. In 1897, they founded the Union of Jewish Workers in Poland and Russia (commonly known as the Bund) as a way to “bring Russian Socialism to the Jewish Street.” 

Following the second wave of pograms that began in 1903, however, the same Russian Socialist party endorsed the pogroms as a blow to Jewish capitalism. Russian Jews turned socialist found themselves politically homeless, abandoned by the very same comrades with whom they had fought for years, and confronted by the disappointing revelation that socialist revolution was not the great antidote to antisemitism they had assumed it to be. 

In retrospect, these disillusioned Jewish socialists were blindsided by an assumption that a movement and ideology claiming to be universalist and trans-national could not and would not single out Jews. On the contrary, it was now clear to Jewish socialists that antisemitism would persist in the post-revolutionary world that their non-Jewish comrades envisioned. In response, some hitherto Russian Jewish socialists embraced Zionism, combining the aims of social revolution and Jewish sovereignty, refuge, and agency in a Jewish homeland; this was the origin of Labor Zionism. Others, not yet willing to abandon a future in post-revolutionary Russia, refashioned the Bund as a distinctly Jewish Socialist movement — still fighting to transform the world through revolution but recognizing and celebrating Jewish distinctness in the post-revolutionary world.

Ironically, some of the Jews marching against Israel today see themselves as a latter-day successor to the Bund, noting (correctly) the anti-Zionist outlook of this organization. They ignore, however, the more subtle yet more important lesson that Bundists, though not aligned with Zionism, nonetheless recognized the importance of defending distinctly Jewish interests even within the framework of a movement whose aims are universalist. While equally critical of capitalism, they refused, for example, to join in the condemnation of Jewish capitalism; they insistently defended the welfare of all Jews, Bundist and otherwise. Simply put: no Bundist would ever have aligned with anyone whose aim was to harm Jews.

What's more, the willingness of Jews to deny the State of Israel’s the right to exist oddly parallels the claims of anti-vaxxers. The vaccine revolution of the twentieth century protected people all over the world from the ravages of disease after their forbears had, for centuries, longed and prayed for this very protection. Only a generation in the twentieth century raised — a time when vaccinations routinely provided this protection — could even imaginably take this protection for granted and question the benefits of such protection. Similarly, only a generation of Jews who, after their forebears had prayed for a Jewish homeland for centuries, now live at a time when the existence of the State of Israel was no longer in doubt could take the existence of the State of Israel for granted and question its legitimacy.  

On the other side of the political spectrum, there are Jews (and Israelis) who support and laud the current administration in near salvific terms. The potential pitfalls of this outlook are more difficult to see perhaps, not least of all because, in the short term, this administration is more single-minded in its support of the State of Israel, even when one pares away the hyperbolic rhetoric. Yet here, too, there is an instructive historical precedent: the Balfour Declaration.

The Balfour Declaration was a signature moment in the history of Zionism that transformed a hitherto fledgling Zionist movement into something real; it was also one of the great false dawns in the history of the Jewish people. Based on the immediate Jewish responses (including those of Jews in Detroit that were splashed across the pages of the Jewish Chronicle) one would presumed that the Jews were on the cusp of statehood in 1917. In retrospect, we know this was nowhere near the case. 

Within a decade, the same Jews who lauded Balfour came to terms with the disappointing reality that the British Government did not issue this decree out of love for Jews or support for Zionism and the creation of a Jewish homeland. Rather, they were guided largely by self-interest: win the support of the Zionist Movement so American Jews would convince their government to enter the Great War on the side of the Allies, thereby breaking the stalemate on the Western Front. At the time, Jews were unaware that the British — guided equally by self-interest — had also offered the entirety of Palestine to Arab leaders as part of a future Arab state. 

Once the war ended with an Allied victory, moreover, British self-interest turned British policy in Palestine in the opposite direction: winning the support of Muslims in Palestine and the Middle East in order to win the support of Muslims in India as a counterweight to Gandhi and the surging movement for home rule. Within less than half a decade, the promise of a Jewish homeland was null and void, replaced instead by ever tighter British restrictions on Jewish immigration. Thirty years after Balfour, the British government, once celebrated for its support for a Jewish State, was now the principal impediment to creating that state. The Balfour Declaration was reduced to a distant memory and a largely hollow and exclusively rhetorical gesture that had amounted to nothing practical or tangible. 

Recent events have infused this cautionary tale with new relevance. The unbridled enthusiasm among many American Jews and Israelis regarding Donald Trump recalls the, in retrospect, misplaced Jewish excitement about Balfour. At times verbatim: both Balfour and Trump, for example, have been hailed (incorrectly) as a latter-day Persian King Cyrus. Looking back on the years following the Balfour Declaration, we can see clearly, with the benefit of hindsight, that comparing Balfour to Cyrus was absurd and cringingly naive. 

We lack the benefit of hindsight to evaluate what is taking place now, but, at the very least, we should approach the new administration's rhetoric and putative accomplishments critically, with eyes wide open. Zealous defenders of Trump as Israeli best friend ever cite, for example, the Abraham Accords as exhibit A. A more nuanced and critical appraisal means giving Trump the same amount of credit for the Abraham Accords as President Jimmy Carter merits for the Camp David Accords: little or none. Each of these agreements would have taken place regardless of who was in the Oval Office; in each case, credit is not due to the American President, rather to Begin and Sadat for Camp David, and to Bibi and the Arab leaders who signed the Abraham Accords.

Eyes wide open means also accepting the uncomfortable reality that the staunchly pro-Israel rhetoric of the current administration is, like the rhetoric of Balfour — guided not by a love of Jews or Israel but by highly fickle and malleable political and, in this case, transactional self-interest. Like Balfour, the immediate and short-term impact will likely benefit Israel in its war against Hamas. Even for those who, under the mantra of "I only care about Israel," look past what the current administration's assault on the pillars of American democracy means for Jews, the long-term impact on Israel is murky, at best. 

The most obvious (and, astonishingly, consistently overlooked) example is a straightforward geo-political calculus that the most pro-Trump American Jews and Israelis seem unable or unwilling to see: a stronger Putin means a stronger Islamic Republic of Iran, which is in no way in Israel's best interests. Moreover, can a president who is so easily swayed by flattery and the promise of personal financial gain be seen as a wholly reliable ally?

More than a century ago, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that the synergy of Zionism and Democratic America precluded American Jews from facing the dilemma of choosing between the two. The world is far more complicated now; so is this synergy. The challenge for American Jews remains the same: looking past one-sided voices that reduce this choice to an either/or proposition to find instead the still rich common ground between Israel and America. 

As always, this means not settling for easy-to-digest answers, but helping each see our blind spots and remembering that, just as our closest friends are often also our staunchest critics, we can and should love and support the State of Israel even while recognizing that no democracy is perfect.